The role women in buddhist traditions

Type :

Term papers

Pages :

7 pages

Format :

.doc

Published date :

04/22/2009

Category :

History & geography

Sub category :

Modern history

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Summary :

Introduction
Women in early Indian Buddhism
Historicalimportance of the sayings attributed to Gautama Buddha
Women in Mahayana Buddhism
Changing the female sex
Women in Theravada Buddhism
Conclusion
Bibliography

Abstract

In recent decades, as Buddhism has gained popularity in the West, Western scholars have begun to apply principles of historical analysis to buddhist scriptures. One main purpose of this kind of scholarship is to try and determine which of the sayings attributed to Gautama Buddha in the scriptures are likely to have been said by him. This is very similar to biblical scholarship that seeks to authenticate sayings of Jesus.Ancient buddhist scriptures have been preserved in two places: Sri Lanka and China. The texts in China were taken there from the great buddhist universities in northern India before those universities were destroyed by Turkish invaders in the eighth through eleventh centuries. If the sayings attributed to Buddha do not exist in all the scriptures, it is possible that they were added later by one school of Buddhism and not known or accepted by other schools. This is particularly true if the disputed sayings are inconsistent with other sayings that appear in both sets of scriptures.This paper will look at the way the sayings attributed to Gautama Buddha by buddhist authorities have impacted the lives of buddhist women through the millennia and the historical evidence for the authenticity of those sayings.